Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre sits at 201 Georgian Drive, on the northeast edge of Barrie, and it is not only Barrie’s hospital. RVH describes itself as a regional health centre with many specialized programs and a hub for advanced care in the region, lists cardiac, stroke, oncology and neonatal intensive care among its highly specialized services, and records on its history page that the Simcoe Muskoka Regional Cancer Centre was built on the site.
That regional reach is the thing worth understanding before you buy any equipment.
When someone is discharged from a hospital in downtown Toronto, they usually go home to a house or an apartment within the same city, often within a few kilometres. When someone is discharged from RVH, they might go home to a street in Barrie a few minutes away, or to a farmhouse outside Elmvale, or to a place on the Georgian Bay shore well up the road. The medical instructions are the same. The distance between that person and the next human being who could reach them is not remotely the same. What the first weeks at home actually involve is covered in coming home from the hospital.
Bedford Medical Alert® is a Canadian-owned company with 24/7 monitoring based in Canada, a member of the Ontario Community Support Association, and we have supported hospital education programs and research initiatives from UHN Toronto Rehab to Trillium Health. What we have not done is pretend that a device shortens a road.
Those are the four towns where the County of Simcoe runs its own long-term care homes, four of them, for 541 residents, according to the County’s seniors services pages.
Look at where those four towns sit and you have the shape of the problem. Simcoe County is a large collection of separate places, and Barrie happens to be the biggest of them and the one with the hospital.
For a family, that geography usually shows up as a scheduling question. A daughter in Barrie has the drive up Highway 11 to her mother’s place in Orillia. A son in Toronto is looking at the drive RVH itself describes as 50 minutes north of the city, and that is before he even starts north from Barrie. Neither of them is a bad child. They are just far away, and a fall does not wait for anyone to finish driving. If you are the one doing the driving, caring for a parent from another city or province covers the wider version of this problem.
The practical consequence is that in Simcoe County the call order on a monitoring account matters more than it does downtown. Our operators follow a personalized response plan rather than a script, and for a rural address that plan is worth thinking about properly: who is genuinely ten minutes away, who is an hour away, and whether there is a neighbour on the same road who should be on the list before either of the children.
Most of Bedford’s mobile equipment works on the cellular network, which means coverage is a real question in a county that contains rural townships, cottage roads and a long stretch of Georgian Bay shoreline.
Here is how we handle it. Before anything ships to a rural Simcoe County address we check the coverage situation for that specific address rather than for the region, because regional coverage maps are close to useless at the level of a single property with a hill behind it. If the mobile unit is the wrong answer for a given address, an in-home system on a different connection is often the right one, and that conversation is better had before the equipment arrives than after. The connectivity question in general, including how landline and cellular setups differ and what happens in a power outage, is covered in do you need a landline for a medical alert.
We will not promise you coverage at a specific address sight unseen. Anyone who does is guessing.
If the address you are asking about is a cottage or a second home rather than the year-round house, our page on taking a medical alert to a cottage, farm or second address covers what changes when the device travels and the address on file does not.
Not sure which setup suits your address in Barrie, Orillia, Innisfil or a rural township? Call us at 1-888-755-3055 and we will talk through the coverage and the household before anything is ordered. There is no charge for talking it through by phone.
Before you spend anything privately, look at what already exists around you. A monitoring subscription is one small piece of a much larger local picture.
The County of Simcoe has been designated an Age-Friendly Community by the World Health Organization and is part of the Global Network of Age-Friendly Cities and Communities. The County runs Adult Day Programs that provide daytime respite and support for families and caregivers, and it publishes an activities calendar for older adults across the county. It also administers an Age-Friendly Seniors Housing Grant aimed at making homes more accessible and adaptable for residents aged 60 and over, for those who qualify. The County’s own seniors pages are the place to check the current details, since program terms change and we do not administer any of them.
Home care itself runs through Ontario Health atHome, which coordinates home and community care and long-term care placement. The North Simcoe Muskoka office is at 15 Sperling Drive in Barrie, and that is the route by which publicly funded home care and personal support are arranged after a hospital stay.
Two honest notes about all of the above. First, none of it is Bedford, and we have no role in any of it. Second, Bedford has no free devices, no free trial and no free monitoring, so nothing on this page should be read as suggesting that a public program hands you our service at no cost. Some third-party programs do fund monitoring for people who qualify, and we are as likely as any provider to be funded, but that is a conversation for a case worker rather than a promise from us.
There are five streams, and in Simcoe County the choice between the first two is usually decided by how much of the person’s life happens outside the house.
Home Freedom is the in-home system, a pendant with a base unit, and it suits someone whose day happens indoors and in the garden. The Go Anywhere Pendant is the mobile GPS system, and it suits someone still driving into town, walking a large property or spending time at a place on the water. The Go Anywhere Watch does the same job in a form some people are more willing to actually wear, which matters more than it sounds. Silver Shield is the non-wearable option, a millimetre wave radar sensor that watches for falls without a camera and without anything to remember to put on. Nurse Call is the institutional system, for retirement residences and long-term care operators rather than households.
One thing to be clear about with Silver Shield: it is not monitored by our staff. It alerts family and caregivers automatically according to protocols the family sets, and the 24/7 in that context refers to the sensor and its AI, not to an operator watching a screen.
On automatic fall detection generally, the technology works by reading motion and impact patterns and raising an alarm when those patterns look like a fall. It is genuinely useful. It is also not infallible, and no sensor on the market catches every fall, which is why the button still exists on every device we sell. If you are weighing the in-home unit against the mobile one, Home Freedom versus Go Anywhere sets the two side by side.
Equipment is included with the subscription, so there is no separate device purchase to budget for.
Plans are month to month or annual, whichever you prefer, with a three month minimum at the start and optional six or twelve month initial terms if you want the savings. After any initial term the service reverts to month to month, and there are no cancellation fees at any point. That last part matters in a county with a lot of seasonal residents whose circumstances change with the calendar.
Easy Setup means the equipment arrives ready to work and you are not assembling anything complicated on a kitchen table. Monitoring is in Canada, around the clock, with operators following the personalized response plan set up for that specific household. Bedford brings three generations of experience to that, and in a region where the nearest relative might be an hour away, the quality of the response plan is doing more work than the plastic.
Ready to talk it through? Call Bedford Medical Alert at 1-888-755-3055 and we will help you work out what fits your household in Barrie or anywhere in Simcoe County. If the person you are arranging this for is still out and about, start with the Go Anywhere Systems.
